Democrats are praising freedom and the Constitution this election. They’ve already been America-pilled in response to Trump. I would expect the optics to continue if Harris wins, even as she turns left. If Trump wins, I don’t think we’ll see a revival of wokeness so much as a resurgent “resistance” movement from the left. A Trump win will animate the left and unleash their extreme wing, which has been quiet for the last four years.
I have no idea (at least, not one that I would place money on) what effect a Trump win (I'm still at about coin toss about the probability) might have on the Ds and the left (n.b. the [American] left and the left wing of the Ds are far from being synonyms, though there is certainly very heavy overlap), including what might happen re wokeness, although I do think overall that peak woke *relative to some hypothetical national median voter* has definitely passed. I would not care to speculate on what the national median nor Overton window are going to do vis a vis wokeness broad sense over the next decade or two. To some degree it probably depends on what Trump does and how the dwindling Republican Sanity Caucus responds to whatever Trump does (more Senate acting as a brake than House, I suspect, notwithstanding that the theoretical fraction R might easily be higher in the Senate).
I'm not sure the Trumpelganger wing of the Democrats was all _that_ quiet in 2022, or even quite recently for that matter (see far too many of the responses to 10/7), although I certainly agree that the Ds have signficantly stepped back from the mostly peaceful :( brink as it existed from late 2019 through late 2020 (whereas the Republicans taken as a whole, other than a few weeks in early 2021, have on net stuck to their single guiding principle that the solution to any and all problems is Moar Trump, however that cashes out on any given day/week/month/year).
For 2022 my prime data points showing that the Ds can pick candidates as poorly as the Rs (and the Ds manage it without the Schelling point that is God Emperor Trump to guide them!) would be the D primaries for WI-Sen and OR-5.
Like Richard, I live in CA, in my case in a historically red and now probably reddish purple area. I'm far from sure what is going to happen at the statewide level over the next few years - I *suspect* a continued swim leftward** but again I'm not confident enough in that prediction to place strong bets.
The Ds have probably blown my eminently winnable purple CD (CA-47), although I would hardly be shocked to see the execrable D pull it out over the slightly less execrable R.
** I don't think it got much press outside the state, nor all that much inside the state either, but I found it *quite* helpful for calibrating regarding the CA Republican base to see the vote on the 2021 gubernatorial recall; talk radio blowhard** Larry Elder got about 70% of the total R vote
** hey, Elder has only been married once so he doesn't really count as Real Man - OTOH he was only married for two years and that was 30 years ago; supposedly they divorced because she wanted kids and he didn't - I wonder what golden boy JD Vance would have to say about that?
The demise of woke has been greatly exaggerated. That empire will strike back, no matter what happens with this election. An entire grievance industry depends on it.
"The Democrats’ ability to learn is based on them being smarter, more connected to reality, and having norms of open debate, all characteristics of Elite Human Capital."
If that's true, they're learning disabled. They aren't smarter, the Party that can't answer "what is a woman?" certainly isn't more connected to reality, and the Party now notorious for cancellations, deplatforming, firing, heckler's veto mobs shouting down speakers, "disinvitations" of anyone with the slightest deviation from progressive dogma, federal funding for online censorship and pressure on social media to defund and take down dissenting voices, high percentages ending friendships and cutting off family over political disagreements, and a disturbingly high percentage of members who actively argue against Freedom of Speech and falsely equate speech with violence... If "norms of open debate" are what you're looking for, you'd need a microscope to find it among today's Democrats.
I think Hanania's sentence here is not fundamentally incorrect, it is merely too broad. On many things of great importance, obviously liberals are totally disconnected from reality. However, when it comes to simply getting power and enforcing their will, they are demonstrably better at learning and understanding how to do this, because they have constantly defeated the right at every turn for generations at this point.
They are not demonstrably better in the way Hanania states here. They did not achieve cultural and institutional dominance through superior intellect, grasp of reality, and certainly not through open debate; no they achieved it through the Long March through the Institutions, simply by showing up and then using every scrap of power they could grab to climb the ladder and then discriminated against conservatives when conservatives did not discriminate against them. In short, they owe it all to being less ethical. If Hanania considers that a mark of "High Human Capital", that says a lot about the sort of people he believes best fit to rule and about what he regards as "reality".
I half agree. I agree in the sense that much in politics is determined simply by who is most willing to be nasty and vile. I disagree in the sense that, if you cannot figure this out, that's on you and demonstrates a degree of stupidity.
A lot of the bad stuff you are referring to is committed by campus radicals and protesters. The Democrats have been learning to keep that part of their coalition under better control. Compare how easily they were able to bring the Free Palestine protesters to heel compared to the headaches that BLM caused them (and everyone else) in 2020.
I think that most Democrats could answer "what is a woman" if you allowed them to give a real answer instead of demanding a quick soundbite.
You’ve got to hand it to Vance he does a remarkably good job sanewashing Trump. He’s got the verbal IQ of Obama and just runs circles around the reporters trying to point out how fundamentally anti-democratic Trump is.
Reasonable critiques. FWIW, I agree that Wokeness is unlikely to go back to 2020's absurd heights - at least short of T/V going really hard on the Project 2025 vision, in which case I'll be fully on board with the Wokes anyway (they presumably wouldn't be on board with hereditarianism, but it's a question of broader ethical priorities as opposed to pursuing a pet obsession, even one which you consider important).
> Wokeness (though my definition likely differs slightly from yours) thrives off reaction to the degree of the opposition being needed for its continual survival. The worst excesses when it is aimless alienate everyone (even in LGBT spaces though that is multipost thread topic). To be brief on the latter, Cofnas (and most people writing about wokeness) only write with the perspective of an outgroup and lack understanding of dynamics in left spaces where barring a figure to unite against the cannibalism has an active alienation effect on everyone. It actually reached a point within the past 2-3 years where (until the combination of Project 2025 hysteria+Trump/Vance seeming even more rotted) there was internal backlash to the more extreme woke excesses, in every single community (from tankie to trans spaces). Wokeness trends towards a state of lesser equilibrium once the mania burns out and everyone is left blinking and vaguely disgusted with themselves. Yes to general social leftist concepts, but there is a ceiling and a minor backlashing within spaces after peak weaponization. As I said, perceptual blind spot for those outside. Similar to things like trans people trending towards being libertarians/grey tribe in the absence of existential threats.
Obviously I don't inhabit leftist spaces like the Chapo boards, but I do occasionally check back them, and that correlates with my impression.
In more normie center-left spaces it has increasingly become common knowledge that the worst excesses of 2020-era wokeness were mistakes. I mean things like "defund the police," DiAngelo and Kendi worship, and excusing (only) BLM protests from COVID restrictions because "structural racism is also a public health issue."
People are starting to misremember how much they supported that stuff at the time, and now remember that they always thought it was stupid. People who were on record boosting it are very quiet and don't want to talk about the whole issue. The situation reminds me of what happened after the Iraq war failed. We won't have anything too similar happen again while the memories are fresh. Too many normie libs will pattern-match it to "embarrassing overreach."
You correctly point out that liberals learn from their mistakes. Have you stopped to consider what a loss in this election would teach them? The Democratic party made a bet this cycle that by positioning themselves as the more norm-compliant and moderate party, that voters would respond by rewarding them with their trust. If they lose that bet they will search for other ways to fight MAGA. The most likely outcome is maximally appealing to their base and increasing their apatite for norm-breaking as the only way left to stop the Orange Menace.
Agree with everything here, but please don't take anything Richard Spencer says or does that seriously. The man unironically turned a NATO enthusiast the day his pro-Putin Russian girlfriend dumped him. No wonder Ukraine is his number one issue! He's just fundamentally unwell psychologically, in addition to not being very intelligent to begin with. This is like his 7th political mood swing of his career, and you can be sure a few more are yet to come.
Cofnas does a really good job of stating the problem (rising generations are woke) and comes up with one solution that's exactly what he cares the most about and hasn't really worked all that well in isolation.
I think, when you get down to it, it's a moral problem in the sense of people's morals--the left's capture of the schools, universities, and mass media (in the 60s-2000s, before social media started eroding their power) successfully indoctrinated zoomers and millennials. (Gen X still had parents who resisted, I think, and that had some effect.) So logical arguments of the sort people like us like aren't going to be all that effective.
Still, they changed morality, so it's not impossible. Some initial thoughts, and I'd appreciate hearing from others:
1. Artists are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (to paraphrase Shelley)--look at the way media shaped everyone's opinions, from 60s movies telling people to distrust authority to Will & Grace making people less anti-gay to all the endless books for women celebrating divorce. You have to come up with a moral vision that's entertaining and engaging. Young men are very poorly served by our current entertainment industry and are actually attacked by it in many cases. Nobody says it has to be books or movies--video games are very attractive to this demographic--but this is something I think the right (because these areas leaned left historically for a very long time) really underestimates. I'm not really distinguishing between high and low culture--you need both for different reasons--but someone more tied into the arts could speak here.
2. Obviously you have to take back the school systems at some point. Others have looked at this better than me, and without kids this isn't something I follow very closely.
3. Elite capture (Harvard etc. being super left wing) is another problem--conservatives know we will always have a ruling class, the only question is who they are going to be. There are a couple strategies, all being tried by others, including raising counter-elites (this can take a huge time and then you have to maneuver them into power), causing elite defection (as the brouhaha over antisemitism shows, even the president of Harvard fears donors), attacking the money (via taxation of the massive endowments or other strategies) or credibility (I think the right has this well in hand) of existing elite institutions.
4. All the messages in the world won't work if you don't let young men be young men. You have to dismantle (or weaken) the DEI/affirmative action edifice that makes it difficult for a significant number to earn enough of a living to attract a mate (as we all know taking a supportive role isn't attractive to most women, except perhaps in the upper middle class where the guy has status to burn). I think most guys (not all!) would prefer a family to porn and weed, that's just not on the table for a lot of them these days.
I'm likely less informed than you on this issue, but how would Walz' comments around the First Amendment and misinformation—and the calls from Obama and Clinton for more censorship—not be the opposite of "America-Pilling"? It seems to me that they are openly attacking the First Amendment.
Walz' comments were about the context of election misinformation. Misleading people about where polling places are or how to fill out your ballot etc to prevent them from voting. The Supreme Court agrees his is not protected by the first amendment.
Thank you for your reply, that makes sense to me. Yet, it seems like his comments WRT hate speech (rather than misinformation) is concerning. From the link you provided:
"Walz was quite wrong in saying that "There's no guarantee to free speech" as to "hate speech." The Supreme Court has made clear that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment"
So, wouldn't that also constitute an attack on (or, at the very least a grave misunderstanding of) the First Amendment from a prospective Vice President?
"America can’t be a racist hellhole that constantly tortures people of color and also the indispensable nation whose moral superiority gives it the right to tell other countries how to live," this reminds me a lot of the 1960s: Civil rights movements were happening while the war in Vietnam was happening.
The civil-rights advocates were the ones advocating for the crushing and enslavement of foreigners under imperial despotism. The voluntary Western surrender of Vietnam to Stalinism was one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th Century, and even worse were the atrocities that followed the Hanoi-supported communist conquest of Cambodia. All of that directly a result of giving the "peace movement" what they wanted. A result that happened under a moderate Republican president who sold out a U.N. Security Council seat, held by a reliable American ally, to the most blood-drenched communist regime in the entire world.
No historical era of ours is more in need of revision.
LBJ was a VP who probably got in over his head. (Sounding familiar... ) I've heard the idea that he pushed forward the Civil Rights Act because the "imperial despotism" thing wasn't looking good, like an optic win at home or something like that. But that was in 1964 before things escalated
He wasn't in over his head. LBJ was one of the most hardened, experienced, and intelligent presidents we've ever had. I can't think of any Democratic president or candidate we've had less like Harris. He pushed forward the CRA both for reasons of ideology and personal popularity. The latter clearly worked in his favor, as he absolutely crushed Goldwater in '64, to a level no Dem since has ever come close to matching:
Didn't work so well as actual policy. The CRA from the beginning took our historic liberties of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience into the wood chipper. But that was not a deviation for Johnson. Racist and gross though he was, he was also a longtime supporter of expansive government reach.
The dimming of wokeness’ crusading energy isn’t enough. Its centering of identity in our institutions persists, ready for the next swing of the pendulum. Could a Trump administration prohibit identity from being a consideration or criterion in all things federal or is that just cheap talk?
It doesn't seem that pragmatic to keep forgetting that bad ideas have repeatedly failed in the past and to try them at national scale again while howling down dissenters. I would instead describe it instead as myopic to only think about the currently popular political trend within your party.
Would a Harris win slow down the Democrats' retreat from wokeness? My tendency is to view a Trump win as a necessary corrective to the woke capture of the Dems.
Nathan Cofnas could not be more FOS, even if it was his goal to appear FOS. I’m still trying to figure out why he writes all his self serving crap about genetic intelligence when he’s so dumb. Quite the ruse I suppose.
"As for refusing to accept the results of elections, why is that only a problem when Trump does it, but not when Hilary does it? Or Gore in 2000? Or Kerry in 2004? Or Abrams in 2018?"
You are talking agony the coup attempt without knowing the facts. I am banning you for a month. This comment section assumes a basic familiarity with recent historical events.
I think the article overstates the intentionality of Trump to overturn the election results. For one, there is no evidence that Jan 6 was anything but organic. And then when his most hardcore supporters show up to support him in the capital, can he really turn his back on them to say to them go back home? I think Bentham ascribes too much intentionality to this, what is more plausible about trumps motivations is, well a reflexive fuck you to the "deep state" and an unwillingness to stop his most ardent supporters. Very different from actively planning and calling for mob violence in the capital
Sorry, banning you for a week. You’re very polite, but this was a coup attempt, and I will not have anyone here who denies what we all saw with our own eyes. This is “sky is blue” territory, a precondition for being able to have a discussion about current events.
Democrats are praising freedom and the Constitution this election. They’ve already been America-pilled in response to Trump. I would expect the optics to continue if Harris wins, even as she turns left. If Trump wins, I don’t think we’ll see a revival of wokeness so much as a resurgent “resistance” movement from the left. A Trump win will animate the left and unleash their extreme wing, which has been quiet for the last four years.
Resistance minus wokeness is usually in effect conservative!
I have no idea (at least, not one that I would place money on) what effect a Trump win (I'm still at about coin toss about the probability) might have on the Ds and the left (n.b. the [American] left and the left wing of the Ds are far from being synonyms, though there is certainly very heavy overlap), including what might happen re wokeness, although I do think overall that peak woke *relative to some hypothetical national median voter* has definitely passed. I would not care to speculate on what the national median nor Overton window are going to do vis a vis wokeness broad sense over the next decade or two. To some degree it probably depends on what Trump does and how the dwindling Republican Sanity Caucus responds to whatever Trump does (more Senate acting as a brake than House, I suspect, notwithstanding that the theoretical fraction R might easily be higher in the Senate).
I'm not sure the Trumpelganger wing of the Democrats was all _that_ quiet in 2022, or even quite recently for that matter (see far too many of the responses to 10/7), although I certainly agree that the Ds have signficantly stepped back from the mostly peaceful :( brink as it existed from late 2019 through late 2020 (whereas the Republicans taken as a whole, other than a few weeks in early 2021, have on net stuck to their single guiding principle that the solution to any and all problems is Moar Trump, however that cashes out on any given day/week/month/year).
For 2022 my prime data points showing that the Ds can pick candidates as poorly as the Rs (and the Ds manage it without the Schelling point that is God Emperor Trump to guide them!) would be the D primaries for WI-Sen and OR-5.
Like Richard, I live in CA, in my case in a historically red and now probably reddish purple area. I'm far from sure what is going to happen at the statewide level over the next few years - I *suspect* a continued swim leftward** but again I'm not confident enough in that prediction to place strong bets.
The Ds have probably blown my eminently winnable purple CD (CA-47), although I would hardly be shocked to see the execrable D pull it out over the slightly less execrable R.
** I don't think it got much press outside the state, nor all that much inside the state either, but I found it *quite* helpful for calibrating regarding the CA Republican base to see the vote on the 2021 gubernatorial recall; talk radio blowhard** Larry Elder got about 70% of the total R vote
** hey, Elder has only been married once so he doesn't really count as Real Man - OTOH he was only married for two years and that was 30 years ago; supposedly they divorced because she wanted kids and he didn't - I wonder what golden boy JD Vance would have to say about that?
The demise of woke has been greatly exaggerated. That empire will strike back, no matter what happens with this election. An entire grievance industry depends on it.
"The Democrats’ ability to learn is based on them being smarter, more connected to reality, and having norms of open debate, all characteristics of Elite Human Capital."
If that's true, they're learning disabled. They aren't smarter, the Party that can't answer "what is a woman?" certainly isn't more connected to reality, and the Party now notorious for cancellations, deplatforming, firing, heckler's veto mobs shouting down speakers, "disinvitations" of anyone with the slightest deviation from progressive dogma, federal funding for online censorship and pressure on social media to defund and take down dissenting voices, high percentages ending friendships and cutting off family over political disagreements, and a disturbingly high percentage of members who actively argue against Freedom of Speech and falsely equate speech with violence... If "norms of open debate" are what you're looking for, you'd need a microscope to find it among today's Democrats.
I think Hanania's sentence here is not fundamentally incorrect, it is merely too broad. On many things of great importance, obviously liberals are totally disconnected from reality. However, when it comes to simply getting power and enforcing their will, they are demonstrably better at learning and understanding how to do this, because they have constantly defeated the right at every turn for generations at this point.
They are not demonstrably better in the way Hanania states here. They did not achieve cultural and institutional dominance through superior intellect, grasp of reality, and certainly not through open debate; no they achieved it through the Long March through the Institutions, simply by showing up and then using every scrap of power they could grab to climb the ladder and then discriminated against conservatives when conservatives did not discriminate against them. In short, they owe it all to being less ethical. If Hanania considers that a mark of "High Human Capital", that says a lot about the sort of people he believes best fit to rule and about what he regards as "reality".
I half agree. I agree in the sense that much in politics is determined simply by who is most willing to be nasty and vile. I disagree in the sense that, if you cannot figure this out, that's on you and demonstrates a degree of stupidity.
A lot of the bad stuff you are referring to is committed by campus radicals and protesters. The Democrats have been learning to keep that part of their coalition under better control. Compare how easily they were able to bring the Free Palestine protesters to heel compared to the headaches that BLM caused them (and everyone else) in 2020.
I think that most Democrats could answer "what is a woman" if you allowed them to give a real answer instead of demanding a quick soundbite.
This is the least convinced I've ever been after reading a Hanania article
You’ve got to hand it to Vance he does a remarkably good job sanewashing Trump. He’s got the verbal IQ of Obama and just runs circles around the reporters trying to point out how fundamentally anti-democratic Trump is.
Blud work on your reading comprehension don't make me take you to ohio
Reasonable critiques. FWIW, I agree that Wokeness is unlikely to go back to 2020's absurd heights - at least short of T/V going really hard on the Project 2025 vision, in which case I'll be fully on board with the Wokes anyway (they presumably wouldn't be on board with hereditarianism, but it's a question of broader ethical priorities as opposed to pursuing a pet obsession, even one which you consider important).
I found this comment on X so instructive that I'm reprinting it here: https://x.com/Xenoimpulse/status/1853178154267091385
> Wokeness (though my definition likely differs slightly from yours) thrives off reaction to the degree of the opposition being needed for its continual survival. The worst excesses when it is aimless alienate everyone (even in LGBT spaces though that is multipost thread topic). To be brief on the latter, Cofnas (and most people writing about wokeness) only write with the perspective of an outgroup and lack understanding of dynamics in left spaces where barring a figure to unite against the cannibalism has an active alienation effect on everyone. It actually reached a point within the past 2-3 years where (until the combination of Project 2025 hysteria+Trump/Vance seeming even more rotted) there was internal backlash to the more extreme woke excesses, in every single community (from tankie to trans spaces). Wokeness trends towards a state of lesser equilibrium once the mania burns out and everyone is left blinking and vaguely disgusted with themselves. Yes to general social leftist concepts, but there is a ceiling and a minor backlashing within spaces after peak weaponization. As I said, perceptual blind spot for those outside. Similar to things like trans people trending towards being libertarians/grey tribe in the absence of existential threats.
Obviously I don't inhabit leftist spaces like the Chapo boards, but I do occasionally check back them, and that correlates with my impression.
In more normie center-left spaces it has increasingly become common knowledge that the worst excesses of 2020-era wokeness were mistakes. I mean things like "defund the police," DiAngelo and Kendi worship, and excusing (only) BLM protests from COVID restrictions because "structural racism is also a public health issue."
People are starting to misremember how much they supported that stuff at the time, and now remember that they always thought it was stupid. People who were on record boosting it are very quiet and don't want to talk about the whole issue. The situation reminds me of what happened after the Iraq war failed. We won't have anything too similar happen again while the memories are fresh. Too many normie libs will pattern-match it to "embarrassing overreach."
You correctly point out that liberals learn from their mistakes. Have you stopped to consider what a loss in this election would teach them? The Democratic party made a bet this cycle that by positioning themselves as the more norm-compliant and moderate party, that voters would respond by rewarding them with their trust. If they lose that bet they will search for other ways to fight MAGA. The most likely outcome is maximally appealing to their base and increasing their apatite for norm-breaking as the only way left to stop the Orange Menace.
Agree with everything here, but please don't take anything Richard Spencer says or does that seriously. The man unironically turned a NATO enthusiast the day his pro-Putin Russian girlfriend dumped him. No wonder Ukraine is his number one issue! He's just fundamentally unwell psychologically, in addition to not being very intelligent to begin with. This is like his 7th political mood swing of his career, and you can be sure a few more are yet to come.
Cofnas does a really good job of stating the problem (rising generations are woke) and comes up with one solution that's exactly what he cares the most about and hasn't really worked all that well in isolation.
I think, when you get down to it, it's a moral problem in the sense of people's morals--the left's capture of the schools, universities, and mass media (in the 60s-2000s, before social media started eroding their power) successfully indoctrinated zoomers and millennials. (Gen X still had parents who resisted, I think, and that had some effect.) So logical arguments of the sort people like us like aren't going to be all that effective.
Still, they changed morality, so it's not impossible. Some initial thoughts, and I'd appreciate hearing from others:
1. Artists are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (to paraphrase Shelley)--look at the way media shaped everyone's opinions, from 60s movies telling people to distrust authority to Will & Grace making people less anti-gay to all the endless books for women celebrating divorce. You have to come up with a moral vision that's entertaining and engaging. Young men are very poorly served by our current entertainment industry and are actually attacked by it in many cases. Nobody says it has to be books or movies--video games are very attractive to this demographic--but this is something I think the right (because these areas leaned left historically for a very long time) really underestimates. I'm not really distinguishing between high and low culture--you need both for different reasons--but someone more tied into the arts could speak here.
2. Obviously you have to take back the school systems at some point. Others have looked at this better than me, and without kids this isn't something I follow very closely.
3. Elite capture (Harvard etc. being super left wing) is another problem--conservatives know we will always have a ruling class, the only question is who they are going to be. There are a couple strategies, all being tried by others, including raising counter-elites (this can take a huge time and then you have to maneuver them into power), causing elite defection (as the brouhaha over antisemitism shows, even the president of Harvard fears donors), attacking the money (via taxation of the massive endowments or other strategies) or credibility (I think the right has this well in hand) of existing elite institutions.
4. All the messages in the world won't work if you don't let young men be young men. You have to dismantle (or weaken) the DEI/affirmative action edifice that makes it difficult for a significant number to earn enough of a living to attract a mate (as we all know taking a supportive role isn't attractive to most women, except perhaps in the upper middle class where the guy has status to burn). I think most guys (not all!) would prefer a family to porn and weed, that's just not on the table for a lot of them these days.
Criticism welcome!
"(to paraphrase Shelley)"
To adapt Shelley (to your broader purposes, rather than express what he said but in different words).
(Pedantic? I?)
Fair. Thanks!
I'm likely less informed than you on this issue, but how would Walz' comments around the First Amendment and misinformation—and the calls from Obama and Clinton for more censorship—not be the opposite of "America-Pilling"? It seems to me that they are openly attacking the First Amendment.
Thank you for a very though-provoking article.
Walz' comments were about the context of election misinformation. Misleading people about where polling places are or how to fill out your ballot etc to prevent them from voting. The Supreme Court agrees his is not protected by the first amendment.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/08/08/vp-candidate-tim-walz-on-theres-no-guarantee-to-free-speech-on-misinformation-or-hate-speech-and-especially-around-our-democracy/
Thank you for your reply, that makes sense to me. Yet, it seems like his comments WRT hate speech (rather than misinformation) is concerning. From the link you provided:
"Walz was quite wrong in saying that "There's no guarantee to free speech" as to "hate speech." The Supreme Court has made clear that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment"
So, wouldn't that also constitute an attack on (or, at the very least a grave misunderstanding of) the First Amendment from a prospective Vice President?
"America can’t be a racist hellhole that constantly tortures people of color and also the indispensable nation whose moral superiority gives it the right to tell other countries how to live," this reminds me a lot of the 1960s: Civil rights movements were happening while the war in Vietnam was happening.
The civil-rights advocates were the ones advocating for the crushing and enslavement of foreigners under imperial despotism. The voluntary Western surrender of Vietnam to Stalinism was one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th Century, and even worse were the atrocities that followed the Hanoi-supported communist conquest of Cambodia. All of that directly a result of giving the "peace movement" what they wanted. A result that happened under a moderate Republican president who sold out a U.N. Security Council seat, held by a reliable American ally, to the most blood-drenched communist regime in the entire world.
No historical era of ours is more in need of revision.
LBJ was a VP who probably got in over his head. (Sounding familiar... ) I've heard the idea that he pushed forward the Civil Rights Act because the "imperial despotism" thing wasn't looking good, like an optic win at home or something like that. But that was in 1964 before things escalated
He wasn't in over his head. LBJ was one of the most hardened, experienced, and intelligent presidents we've ever had. I can't think of any Democratic president or candidate we've had less like Harris. He pushed forward the CRA both for reasons of ideology and personal popularity. The latter clearly worked in his favor, as he absolutely crushed Goldwater in '64, to a level no Dem since has ever come close to matching:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/to-fight-for-civil-rights-lyndon-b-johnson-settled-for-the-middle-ground-180981482/
Didn't work so well as actual policy. The CRA from the beginning took our historic liberties of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience into the wood chipper. But that was not a deviation for Johnson. Racist and gross though he was, he was also a longtime supporter of expansive government reach.
The dimming of wokeness’ crusading energy isn’t enough. Its centering of identity in our institutions persists, ready for the next swing of the pendulum. Could a Trump administration prohibit identity from being a consideration or criterion in all things federal or is that just cheap talk?
It doesn't seem that pragmatic to keep forgetting that bad ideas have repeatedly failed in the past and to try them at national scale again while howling down dissenters. I would instead describe it instead as myopic to only think about the currently popular political trend within your party.
Would a Harris win slow down the Democrats' retreat from wokeness? My tendency is to view a Trump win as a necessary corrective to the woke capture of the Dems.
Nathan Cofnas could not be more FOS, even if it was his goal to appear FOS. I’m still trying to figure out why he writes all his self serving crap about genetic intelligence when he’s so dumb. Quite the ruse I suppose.
Not a useful comment. I don't want stuff like that here.
And I don’t want stupid commenters. Banned so you don’t come back.
Yes because it’s true and backed up with reasons. For a “radical individualist” you sure have drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid.
"As for refusing to accept the results of elections, why is that only a problem when Trump does it, but not when Hilary does it? Or Gore in 2000? Or Kerry in 2004? Or Abrams in 2018?"
Here you go, I'm just going to refer people to this essay whenever they try to make a false equivalence like this: https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup
You are talking agony the coup attempt without knowing the facts. I am banning you for a month. This comment section assumes a basic familiarity with recent historical events.
I think the article overstates the intentionality of Trump to overturn the election results. For one, there is no evidence that Jan 6 was anything but organic. And then when his most hardcore supporters show up to support him in the capital, can he really turn his back on them to say to them go back home? I think Bentham ascribes too much intentionality to this, what is more plausible about trumps motivations is, well a reflexive fuck you to the "deep state" and an unwillingness to stop his most ardent supporters. Very different from actively planning and calling for mob violence in the capital
Did you even read the article? The things you say literally has no relation to anything in it.
Sorry, banning you for a week. You’re very polite, but this was a coup attempt, and I will not have anyone here who denies what we all saw with our own eyes. This is “sky is blue” territory, a precondition for being able to have a discussion about current events.